Concert Review: Yefim Bronfman At UB

That Low Rumbling You Heard Last Evening? It Wasn't Another Earthquake.

If you were relaxing in your living room last night and you felt a subtle rumbling, don’t worry. It wasn’t a repeat of February’s earthquake but rather Yefim Bronfman in East Amherst, breaking in UB’s new Bösendorfer piano.

Yefim Bronfman is a legend, famously described by novelist Philip Roth in “The Human Stain” (2000) as follows:

Then Bronfman appears. Bronfman the brontosaur! Mr. Fortissimo! Enter Bronfman to play at such a pace and with such bravado as to knock my morbidity clear out of the ring. He is conspicuously massive through the upper torso . . . somebody who has strolled into the music shed out of a circus where he is the strongman and who takes on the piano as a ridiculous challenge to the gargantuan strength he revels in.

Yefim Bronfman looks less like the person who is going to play the piano than like the guy who should be moving it. I had never before seen anybody go at a piano like this sturdy little barrel of an unshaven Russian Jew."

Bronfman was born in Tashkent in …